My NY Horror Show 2015 experience

I’m curing the post-holiday blues with some winter darkness…at the NY Horror Show! While it might begin to grow over time, this little convention right here on Long Island was great because you didn’t feel lost in a sea of monsters.

SATURDAY, JANUARY 17, 2015
DAY 1

Monsters were everywhere. There are two of them now.

There was tons of merchandise. There were discussion panels with horror experts. Indie horror films were shown nonstop. And there was a nasty smell in the hall of the screening rooms.

Some of the guests included:

There were heads floating in fish tanks in the lobby.

And there was a room full of horror junk for me to buy. Here’s all the new crap I got for my Dan Cave:

There was one vendor with boxes full of small mini posters of horror movies, rock artists, and comic books. As my friend flipped through them (along with a whole line of customers), this dude whined nonstop about how the event sucked, was too small, had no good guests and low attendance, and how he planned to pack up pretty soon and be done with it. This was like the first hour of the first day. We were thrilled to think this ungrateful twerp would be gone soon after my friend bought his posters.

The whiner was still right there in his booth the next day.

Actor Robert Mukes from House of 1,000 Corpses and Slumber Party Slaughter is as tall as I am wide.

And horror rapper ZombG was so enthusiastic about all his projects. He told us about his upcoming horror flick with Snoop Dogg, let my friend taste his line of vodka, which she loved (and you can learn more about here), and did some freestyle rapping for us:

That evening we partook in a few movies….

THE SHOWER (2013)
(Since re-titled KILLER PARTY)

Because this was a horror convention and not just a film festival, I didn’t get to spend every minute watching movies. But I am so glad my instincts led me to sit in on The Shower. THIS is how you do an indie horror comedy.

Fantastic cast, great comic timing and horror pacing, plenty of gore and suspense, and a whole load of cute guys. The cutie with the great 70s pornstache even gives a muscle dude a rubdown with tanning lotion….

Sticking to the most basic infected/zombie premise, a group of friends gathered in a house for a baby shower soon discovers there has been some sort of outbreak and people are turning almost instantly into homicidal maniacs…starting with the clown at the party. Oh yeah. There’s a clown maniac….

And a little girl maniac….

I really hope The Shower gets DVD distribution because I need it in my collection (UPDATE: it’s now available on itunes and VOD as Killer Party). It is ideal for horror parties. And adorable and super nice director Alex Drummond scored two awards at the event for Best Feature and Best Director.

CRAZY BITCHES (2014)

Awesome title, right? The premise of “slasher” Crazy Bitches is simple—a bunch of chicks and one gay guy in a cabin in the woods being stalked by a killer who picks them off based on their vanity of choice. Still sounds good, right? The opening kill involves a shirtless sexy dude, a woman with huge tits, and a vicious and brutal kill (UPDATE – It appears they sterilized this scene – on Amazon Prime, they are both dressed during the sex scene).

Crazy Bitches is a chick flick pretending to be a horror film. It’s actually more of a lesbian feminist flick. There are hints of humor, but the movie is really a dramatic tale of the feelings of all these women. Ugh. A chick flick, I tell you. In the first hour, it was all talk with only two kills that left you feeling cheated. Quick and painless for sure. Not scary, not suspenseful.

A scene of chatter. Fade to…a scene of chatter. And then another. And another. Endless. At some point, there’s a brief moment with a Ouija board and a tale of girls gone dead in the cabin years before. But don’t worry. It won’t distract you from more…female drama.

And really, the film shapes up to be more of a lesbian film as it progresses because pretty much every chick on the trip has slept with the lesbian but wants to keep it secret.

In lesbian horror, bitch be like, “EEK! A MAN!”

This brought back some bad memories. Years ago I reviewed a lesbian slasher called Make a Wish. I had to go read it to see why I thought it sucked so much. Guess why? No horror or suspense, all female talk…and all small tits. Yeah. I actually complained about that.

While that last part isn’t an issue here, female and/or lesbian directors who want to make a good slasher, or at least, a perfectly cliché slasher, need to go back and watch Rita Mae Brown’s classic Slumber Party Massacre.

With a title like Crazy Bitches, I was expecting a bunch of young mean bimbos to just cat claw each other senseless while dancing around in their undies. Instead, I got a bunch of older women who have totally experienced life and really need to talk about it. I’m not ageist. I would have been fine if they were all Real Housewives crazy bitches, but they weren’t. Plus, the only time we got any sense of a particular vanity so we’d know how a certain victim was going to die was the one time the victim mentioned it to clue us in. They talk nonstop and only once do they give us a clue about their issues?

MAYBE Crazy Bitches makes up for all the feminine oral torture in the last 20 minutes of its running time. I wouldn’t know. See, during the screening…the movie froze. When it did, about three quarters of the audience seriously raced for the door instantly. But about six of us felt there had to be some redeeming horror qualities and desperately tried to wait for them to fix the glitch. All our chatter was about the absence of horror in this horror movie. And we had to leave it at that because they never did get the movie going again.

I’m not going to lie. I really want to see the final 20 minutes of Crazy Bitches. I want to know how it ends. I want to see it really give us what we’d been waiting for so I can consider it a “slow-burner.” And I want to see if the gay guy gets another funny line, which finally happened right before the movie froze.

If I ever get the chance, I’ll post the update. In the meantime, here is an article in which director Jane Clark explains that she did not like horror movies when she made the movie. Case closed.

UPDATE: Finally saw the rest of the film on Netflix in April of 2015. The gay guy definitely has his chance to shine…but naturally, he dies soon after. He’s the only thing that could have saved the film. Even after finding dead bodies and knowing there’s a killer on the loose, the girls go back for more talking!

DORCHESTER’S REVENGE: THE RETURN OF CRINOLINE HEAD (2014)

Dorchester’s Revenge director Tommy Faircloth and me.

I didn’t see Dorchester’s Revenge this time—because I’ve already seen it twice and it was playing at the same fricking time as Crazy Bitches. I should have seen it for a third time. But anyway, I blog about it here. And, what’s extra special about the movie this time is that director Tommy Faircloth and his hubby Robert were at the event! And they made day two of the convention a whole lot of horror fun….

SUNDAY, JANUARY 18, 2015
DAY 2

Before the event started, we got breakfast together. But first I dragged Tommy and Robert down to my Dan Cave and plugged them. I mean…plugged their movies. See the end of my highlights video below for the full commercial.

After that, I gave them the full Long Island horror tour, which consists of…going past the Amityville house. We should have kidnapped Rutanya Alda of Amityville II: The Possession from the event and taken her with us for a real trippy experience.

Then it was back to the convention.

Freddy wanted to trade his stripes for my flannel…

The Walking Dead gave it that authentic Sunday feeling…

And I finally got some attention from a man instead of a monster. Actually, it was me blatantly drooling over Toxic Avenger 2&3 star John Altamura that led to this reaction from him. You can also see him in action in the video below.

I actually had more luck with a lady. A goth chick in pigtails approached me to shower me with compliments about my hair and beard. I happily thanked her…and now I’m wondering. Was she looking for a sugar Danny and my straightdar just sux?

Jonathan Tiersten of Sleepaway Camp entertained me with stories of working on the anthology film The Perfect House, which I blog about here. He also gave scream queen Tiffany Shepis a call, which again…you can see in the video below.

Oddly enough, the smell in the screening room hall was gone for a while, but returned as the event continued.

I got to take a picture with the ghouls form the Chamber of Horrors NY haunted attraction…I was in their commercial this past Halloween!

The highlight of the day had to be the ceiling tiles that were dropping throughout the hotel. There were buckets catching water everywhere because it was raining hard that day, and two ceiling tiles even crashed right on the stage during the film awards ceremony.

Don’t know how they’re going to top that next year, but I can’t wait. And here, at last, is the highlights video:

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About Daniel

I am the author of the horror anthologies CLOSET MONSTERS: ZOMBIED OUT AND TALES OF GOTHROTICA and HORNY DEVILS, and the horror novels COMBUSTION and NO PLACE FOR LITTLE ONES.
I am also the founder of BOYS, BEARS & SCARES, a facebook page for gay male horror fans! Check it out and like it at www.facebook.com/BoysBearsandScares.